Thursday 30 December 2004 at 5:42 pm
meta-creation_date: 22/12/2004 09:19:23
Engadget has a comprehensive and indepth review of the
Sony PlayStation Portable/PSP.
Retro innovation -
Commodore64 on a Joystick.
PCMagazine -
Ten to AvoidThe Worst Products of the Year. The only one that doesn't ring true is the eMac but it is a PC magazine afterall.
More wikipedia goodness -
Apple Newton.
Compact PC -
Kim Young releases updated Sumicom mini-PC. The size of a drive bay. Awesome.
Great -
Simple guide to LaTeX.
Interesting -
MetroPipe Portable Virtual Privacy Machine. A virtual Linux secure machine that fits on a USB key and runs as a virtual machine.
A similar homebrew effort utilising WindowsCE to create a
PortableCE.
Increasing privacy fears fuel efforts to improve anonymity -
Tor anonymous Internet communication system.
Useful Windows tips -
Windows Explorer Hacks.
One day I'll look into Plone and when I do I'll need some good documentation -
The Definitive Guide to Plone.
Thursday 30 December 2004 at 09:08 am
Basic guide to getting stuff installed and getting information on various types of Unix and Linux systems
SGI Irix
Use the Software Manager via the Toolchest to add and remove packages or use the 'inst' command
For example to install the Multi-processor libraries for Irix, download the appropr iate package (in this case 6.x_mpt_1.3.tardist), untar it, run the inst command as root, select from and point to the local dirctory containing the untarred files, se lect list to view the items to be installed, select conflicts to check for conflict s or dependencies, select go to install and then quit to exit inst.
You can query the installed packages and their versions using the 'versions' command (eg versions | grep perl)
You can find out about SGI hardware via the 'hinv' command
Compaq Tru64
Use the Graphical System Manager (/usr/bin/sysman) or use the 'setld' command (/usr/sbin/setld -l )
For example to update the Fortran compilers or Tru64, download the appropriate pack age (in this case DFA541.tar contains an updated Fortran compiler), untar it, run /usr/sbin/setld -l ./, select the install options and follow the prompts.
You can query the installed packages and their versions using the 'setld -i' command (eg /usr/sbin/setld -i | grep perl)
RedHat Linux
Use the Graphical Gnorpm package manager or use the 'rpm' command (rpm -i )
For example to install Opera, download the package (opera-static-5.0-1.i385.rpm), become root, use rpm -i opera-static-5.0-1.i386.rpm to install it.
Debian Linux
Use the 'apt-get' to get a package from the network (apt-get install will install from a source listed in /etc/apt/sources.list ) or 'dpkg' for a local file command (dpkg install ). 'dselect' will also give you a front end on package management (but I get lost in there to easily). Theres a fairly
definitive guide to apt-get here.
IBM AIX
Use the Graphical or command line version of 'smit'.
On an X interface 'smit' will invoke the motif style GUI version of the tool which will allow you to configure all aspects of the AIX system including the installation of software. Via a telnet or serial console session the ASCII version of the tool is invoked which gives you many of the same options just in text-only mode.
SUN Solaris
Use 'pkgadd' or the Graphical System Manager to install software (/usr/sbin/pkgadd -d ). Note that patches should be applied using patchadd rather than pkgadd
You can find out about SUN hardware using the 'showrev' command which can query hardware and software (eg showrev -a)
Wednesday 22 December 2004 at 10:19 pm
Engadget has a comprehensive and indepth review of the
Sony PlayStation Portable/PSP.
Retro innovation -
Commodore64 on a Joystick.
PCMagazine -
Ten to AvoidThe Worst Products of the Year. The only one that doesn't ring true is the eMac but it is a PC magazine afterall.
More wikipedia goodness -
Apple Newton.
Compact PC -
Kim Young releases updated Sumicom mini-PC. The size of a drive bay. Awesome.
Great -
Simple guide to LaTeX.
Interesting -
MetroPipe Portable Virtual Privacy Machine. A virtual Linux secure machine that fits on a USB key and runs as a virtual machine.
A similar homebrew effort utilising WindowsCE to create a
PortableCE.
Increasing privacy fears fuel efforts to improve anonymity -
Tor anonymous Internet communication system.
Useful Windows tips -
Windows Explorer Hacks.
One day I'll look into Plone and when I do I'll need some good documentation -
The Definitive Guide to Plone.
Friday 17 December 2004 at 08:08 am
Huge news - first
Oracle and Peoplesoft and now
Symantec and Veritas. Thats close to $24bn US changing hands if these deals proceed.
Apple storage tech making slow inroads into enterprise markets -
Oracle uses and endorses Apples Xserv. They'll have a tough time beating the biggies in the storage market but at least they provide a high-quality low cost alternative (especially when Xsan is available).
Very useful resource for Windows application deployment -
Appdeploy.
I wonder if this Nintendo GameBoy Advance gadget will make it out of Japan -
Nintendo MP3/MPEG playback.
Much simpler than the paper LCD screen but no less elegant -
heat sensitive paper clock.
Computer history in fashion -
Geek T-shirts through the ages.
Monday 13 December 2004 at 07:13 am
The web seems to be abuzz with Googles new 'gadget' - still in Beta but it looks promising -
Google Suggest.
Friday 10 December 2004 at 08:07 am
Some links to one of my favourite Unices (IRIX is probably still my fave in terms of an elegant workstation OS). Nowadays it has to be said the only contenders in the commercial Unix race are Solaris and AIX with various Linux distributions leading the open-source charge.
Personally I've found Tru64 on Alpha hardware to be very very simple to install (for Tru64 v 5.1b its still a single cd install with a footprint less than 400Mb) and configure while being very easy to manage and with outstanding stability. In my time I've had the pleasure of using everything from Alphastation 500's through to quad processor ES45 Alphaservers.
In a high performance environment I have good anecdotal evidence to suggest that the same code running on a dual processor Itanium II machine will run at about 40% the speed of slightly older quad processor Alpha machine. So the Itanium has a lot of potential but the Alpha can still hold its own.
The Alpha hardware is also built to a very high spec and very very solid (I guess its easy to see the DEC influence in the steel chassis) compared to the 'cheap' feel of modern x86 based server cases.
Wikipedia has some excellent (and brief) articles on:
The history of
Tru64/Ultrix/OSF/1.
The history of the
Dec Alpha processor.
The evolution of
OpenVMS.
Excellent Tru64/Alpha resource -
Tru64.org.
